Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk!
by papillionacious
Summary: because disobedient pokémon, severe cases of amnesia and multiple near-death experiences build character.
1. CH I: Amelia Walcutt Linford, thank you

**AMELIA LINFORD** was confused.

The two pokémon focused their concerned looks on their owner, devotion shining on each unique face, not daring to even consider anything but hope and optimism. The sneazle and lairon had been with Amelia Linford since their infancy, and a slight loss of memory wasn't going to end their relationships with the eighteen year old girl.

Amelia didn't quite understand what, exactly, she was confused about: all of the information was distant and extremely spotty, but accessible, all the same. It reminded Amelia of a time when she was first explained how to read the hands of the clock; the child understood that the hands told the time, of course, and that time was a measure of units that grown-ups took very seriously. But it took her weeks to read the Roman numerals successfully, and even longer to comprehend the deeper, philosophic side of the subject. Time was simply a measure of distance: it didn't move. "We move," Amelia Linford had once suggested. It was the last, and only, scene Amelia could remember before the accident and the subsequent case of amnesia: everything else was a haze.

In fact, this was _exactly_ like reading a clock for the first time. What did these animals (if they were animals)... these _pokémon_, mean to her, before? What did they mean to the rest of the world? Were they pets, or were they more than just a hobby? Why were they caged ('humanely', the nurse had insisted) in tiny balls, if they were so damned important to her?

The teenager considered the sneasel the longest, comforted by it's sweet face and loyal mew. She remembered only the sneasel, who hadn't been in a pokéball and had, instead, remained faithfully by her side, while the girl had been confined to bed. This was the first time she remembered ever laying eyes on the lairon; to be honest, she didn't quite understand the concept of pokémon, anyways.

"Do they have names?" She asked the nurse, who was determined to keep a straight face. Likewise, the pokémon never faltered in radiating their happiness.

"Well, yes, Miss Linford. Of course, your sneasel you named Noir... don't you remember?" The silence was absolutely deafening, and Amelia tried to ignored the wide-eyed sneasel. Why were these... creatures, so concerned? Animals couldn't understand human speech: They'd never comprehend the consequences of amnesia.

"No. I'm afraid I don't."

"It'll come back to you, Miss Linford. Don't you worry."

That was, of course, the most worrying bit of it all. Miss Linford _wasn't_ worried, when she felt that was exactly what she should be experiencing, after all. But her subconscious seemed to understand; with a gesture that was all instinct and all encompassing, she held out her hands, where a waiting sneasel jumped with a practiced grace into her arms. Amelia noticed the creature's claws had retracted, and her feathers were neatly tucked in a tail-like stance. '_This sneasel was more than simply a pet to me,_' she concluded. The nurse returned the other pokémon, lairon, to his pokéball; Amelia Linford didn't remember how to do it herself. She wouldn't have remembered her own name, had it not been that her family and caretakers were repetitive with the information.

The sneasel nudged her with a wet nose. The gesture was heartfelt and tear jerking, and only just began to express the admiration the weasel-like character held for her owner. But, most of all, it expressed a simple feeling that meant the world and above to Amelia Linford. '_I understand what you are going through.'_


	2. CH II: Introducing Oliver Nosurnom

**UNLIKE AMELIA LINFORD**, Oliver didn't have the luxury to be confused.

There were some benefits to being chased by a horde of tawny birds, after all. For one, it forced Oliver Last-name-to-be-identified to act sharpish and ignore the strange questions that had been floating around in his continually migraine-aching head for the past month. _Where was he_? _Where was civilization_? Not here, to be sure. Oliver had sweeped the land in a ten mile radius, with no hints of settlement. There were other questions, of course. _Was it amnesia_? A real, legitimate medical condition, that could be treated with a dizzying array of polysyllabic pills? And _when_ was he going to eat _real_ food? That was a common one.

Some questions had only taken ingenuity to answer. The red and white balls, whatever they were called, held his pokémon. These were the only pokémon he remembered; his starter pokémon, luxray; his beloved scyther; and his newly-captured abra. Well, as newly captured as Oliver could tell. All the rest of the animals, like the tawny birds that were now chasing him and his luxray, were a part of the ambiguous word _pokémon_. He could have bothered to consult his mechanical book, which delighted in filling his head with obscure pokémon identities, but Oliver was too afraid to try; that book had an awful habit of naming dangerous peculiarities of a particular pokémon. Those birds, Oliver was sure, had diamond-tough beaks. Or katana precise, razor-sharp claws, perhaps. Probably both.

Oliver wasn't even his real name; it just happened that the boy (youngish, he would have said twenties, but who the hell cared, anyways) had woken up, splitting headache and all, under the shade of an Olive tree. It'd taken four hours to figure out how to open the red-and-white balls, another half hour to manage the electrical book, and approximately fifteen minutes to discover that these so called _pokémon_ held grudges easily and for extended periods of time. Take the tawny birds, for example. They'd kept him on the run for three days.

And before the tawny birds? Bull-like creatures with protruding horns. The mechanical book called them tauros. "**It is famous for it's violent nature,**" the book explained cheerfully, "**and not satisfied unless it is rampaging at all times.**" Unfortunately for Oliver, he was already well aware of the fact. He'd been whimpering at the top of a thick branch by the time the book concluded, "**If there is no opponent for tauros to battle, it will charge at big trees and knock them down to calm itself.**"

Needless to say, Oliver was not lost on the irony of the situation.

At least Luxray seemed to be enjoying himself, completely content with the idea of running for hours on end from the swarm of katana-inspired claws. Oliver, on the the other hand, didn't treat the exercise warmly. He had that certain tickling sensation that hinted towards a long-held tradition: like this was treated more as a sport, than a fatal mistake. Mid-run, he shuttered at the idea of exactly _how many_ times it'd taken this _tradition_ to mold.

He was tired, he was drenched in sweat, and he was hungry (always _so _hungry). He considered whether this God forsaken place was actually a _God forsaken_ place. Hell, in so many words. Hell, with furious birds and a roper's knot of a stomach, worn with use and extremely irritable.

"Hey! Over here!"

"You hear that, Luxray?" Oliver yelled, trying to ignore the voice. "We've gone into the deep end now for sure, buddy."

"You nutter, I'm here! Alive! Finite! Most importantly, not a part of your egregiously incompetent head!"

"La, la, la, la, _that's what they all say~!"_

Oliver reexamined what he said, realized the absurdity of the statement as, one, admitting that people regularly believed you insane was an insanity in of itself, and two, Oliver had something called _amnesia_. He couldn't remember his own _name_, let alone whether he regularly conversed with feminine --possibly sexy feminine-- voices in his head. He looked around defiantly.

"I take that back. I'm not _really_ a flamboyant schizophrenic, I just like speaking in a sing-song voice."

Luxray gave an audible snort.

"Over here, Romeo. Take this."

Following the potentially sexy voice, Oliver spotted a young girl on the back of a leafy-dinosaur _thing_ (brown in color, and snickering at Oliver's current predicament), who wa sholding out a container of some sort. The boy ran closer to the dinosaur, and smiled as he read the label of the jar: Honey.

"Thanks, I could really use some!" He opened the container lid, and grinned at the girl once more.

"Now, use the honey to dist-- _what are you doing_?!"

"Mph, thamphks so much. I'm starving."

"You idiot!" The girl sounded incredulous, which momentarily stopped the boy from devouring the last of the nourishing food.

"What?!" he asked, ready to climb aboard his soap-box. '_I've ran too many miles and slept in too many caves to let some dinosaur-humping broad criticize me!'_

It all happened like a time-be-damned, slow-motioned clip of a bad indie flick. The jar slipped from Oliver's fingers, the jar fell the six short feet to the precariously moving ground, the jar broke into a thousand glass pieces, the jar's contaminants spilled all over Oliver and his luxray.

Equally vexing was the astonishment of the girl. "Oh -- my -- God," she said.

_Here we go again_, he thought.


End file.
